Choices and the Roads Less Traveled.

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you made the opposite choice that you did. For example,

What if I didn’t go to college and decided to stay home after high school?

What if I did go to college, but went to a different university?

What if I moved away from family after graduating college, instead of coming back to my hometown?

Sometimes I think about things like this; only because I wonder what a day in that life would look like. What would my life look like if I didn’t have the ambition to go to college, or get a good paying job? I always wonder where life would have taken me, had I not made the choices I made.

In my profession, I see a lot of people who have decided to make certain choices with their lives; and it has led them down paths of either dysfunction or slow and total destruction. I tend to encounter families at their worst possible point of the downward spiral; and my job is to try to bring them out of that spiral a better and better functioning person. Most times it works, other times, it doesn’t.

There is also a dynamic of people that I see, that is merely here just to take advantage of what the government can do for them and to their benefit. And no, this isn’t coming from a stereotypical place; remember, I work with this dynamic everyday, so I see it. What I find funny is, these people have devised plans so detailed on how to take advantage of everyone they cross paths with, yet they refuse to channel that skill and energy into something like making more of themselves. Why is that?? (The million dollar question in my eyes)

The sad part is, I have seen this in my age group and generation of peers. Women who chose to let anyone and everyone take care of them, rely on other people to meet their needs and their children’s needs, etc. My heart breaks for them, because I feel like to some degree, there is always a choice to be made; you can either find a way out of your situation, or not care and just live whatever way you choose to live. And no matter how much you talk to someone and encourage them to make a change for their lives for the better, you can only talk for so long; it is up to that person to have enough motivation to make a better choice for their lives.

I feel like as a people, we have to make better choices. We have to choose a life better for our future than what we have in the present. We also have a choice to break the cycles of the past and create a new destiny. I feel like it is possible for all to achieve, it’s just a matter of how motivation and how badly you want it.

How do you feel about choices? What choices in life did you make that put you where you are today? Do you feel like everyone could have made those same choices as you, or their are circumstances in life that are beyond the control of someone, and they are forced into certain lifestyles?